A Different Class of Murder

by Laura Thompson

  8. This story is told in Heroes And Contemporaries by Jonathan Aitken, Continuum 2006.

  9. Lady Annabel Goldsmith, Annabel: An Unconventional Life (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004).

  10. Ibid.

  11. For example in Gerring, Lucan Lives.

  12. David Spanier, Easy Money: Inside the Gambler’s Mind (High Stakes, 2006). Interesting that Aspinall did not claim that Jagger had joined the upper classes.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Quotations, respectively, from the Independent, 12 November 2004; Independent on Sunday, 4 September 2005; and Sunday Times 3 July 2005.

  15. This phrase was used on the ITV news and is quoted in Dominic Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain 1974–79. I am again indebted to the book for many of the facts in this section.

  16. MI5, which installed bugs at Downing Street in 1963, even harboured a theory that Hugh Gaitskell, Wilson’s predecessor as leader of the Labour Party, had been murdered by the KGB.

  17. Sarah Curtis (ed.), The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt, Volume I (Macmillan, 1998).

  18. The knighthood was part of the so-called ‘Lavender List’, Wilson’s resignation list, comprising some fifty names written by his secretary Marcia Falkender on lavender-coloured paper. In 2007 Lady Falkender won a BBC settlement against the suggestion that the list was her work. Recipients alongside Goldsmith, with whom Lady Falkender had become friendly, were David Frost, James Hanson and Joseph Kagan. In his diaries Tony Benn wrote of Wilson: ‘That he should pick inadequate, buccaneering, sharp shysters for his honours was disgusting.’

  19. Quoted by James Fox, Sunday Telegraph, 10 October 2004.

  20. Curtis, op. cit

  21. Independent, 7 January 2003. In reference to the Private Eye case, to which Ingrams had alluded in his obituary of Goldsmith in the Guardian, this letter (not from one of Lucan’s friends) was published 22 July 1997: ‘Richard Ingrams leaves out of his obituary the reason for Goldsmith’s “sudden passion for litigation”. Private Eye’s accusation was that he was a criminal, who had helped Lord Lucan escape a murder rap. Had the Eye had solid evidence to support this claim, Goldsmith would have gone to jail. Since it didn’t, it repeated the claim ad nauseam, and Goldsmith issued writs with the same frequency. Why Ingrams regards this as the Eye’s finest hour is beyond me.’

  22. From his obituary in The Times, 19 June 2002, which described him as a ‘large, ebullient man with a quick, caustic wit’, and wrote that ‘the Saturday night dinners he gave with his second wife, Carolyn, made their house in Trevor Square, a stone’s throw from Harrods, probably the greatest sporting “salon” ever assembled. There one might meet sporting legends such as Dennis Lillee, Allan Border, Vitas Gerulaitis, Ilie Nastase, John McEnroe or Jackie Stewart alongside Albert Finney, Diana Rigg, Bryan Ferry, Lord Hanson and Sir David Frost.’

  23. ‘Like a dart’ was Bill’s own description in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, 20 January 1997. ‘There is not a lot you can do about it, really,’ he said. ‘You just have to kick on and make do with what you have got left. I was not intensely depressed about it because it seemed to me a pointless emotion.’ An interview with the Daily Mail, 26 January 1999, quoted him saying that he had never done things ‘by halves’, and referred to his projected parachute jump in aid of the International Spinal Research Trust. ‘I told my anaesthetist that I was going to have a champagne reception in the ambulance after the jump. He advised me to have the reception before the jump.’

  24. Marnham, Trail of Havoc, op.cit.

  25. Although other sources put Elwes’s fee at £200, James Fox himself stated that the figure was £500 (Sunday Telegraph, 10 October 2004).

  26. Daily Express, 21 January 1975, carried photographs from ‘Lucan’s Family Album’, including one from 1968 captioned ‘Skipper Lucan cruising off Sardinia’, in which he was pictured smiling broadly with a drink in his hand.

  Daily Mail, 12 September 1980, showed photographs of Lucan on holiday in Venice; he was described as ‘looking like the doomed composer Mahler’.

  Daily Mirror, 17 August 2008, also printed photographs, and wrote: ‘In one Lord Lucan enjoys a fun bout of “après ski” in the posh Swiss resort of St Moritz – the sort of privileged world the average member of the public would never have seen back in the early 60s. Others show him relaxing on holiday or enjoying happy days at home with his wife Veronica and children in London’s exclusive Belgravia. Veronica opened the private family album as part of her bid to set the record straight about what happened to the Irish peer after he disappeared in November, 1974.’

  In Sunday Telegraph, 10 October 2004, James Fox stated very clearly that the photographs illustrating his article had come from Veronica: ‘Lady Lucan sold us rights to her family albums.’ Fox also explained that he had been unaware of the accusations against Elwes as he was then out of the country.

  I regret it badly. Had I known about Elwes’s predicament I would certainly have revealed the source of the Acapulco pictures at the time. Twenty years or so ago, in exasperation at the continuing myth that Elwes was to blame for them, I did reveal the source in the letters page of the Spectator, but nobody seemed to notice – except Lady Lucan.

  The pictures had been lying about in Lady Lucan’s house and I had taken them along with her photograph albums, with her consent. She left a message on my answering machine after this revelation saying: ‘You know what we do with foxes. We break their necks and break their backs.’ She didn’t leave her name, but I would recognise her voice anywhere.

  27. Daily Telegraph, 9 September 2000.

  THE STORY: MARRIAGE

  1. Her daughter Lady Barbara Bevan died aged sixty-one on 17 December 1963, Pat Lucan on 21 January 1964.

  2. Daily Mail, 19 September 1998.

  3. This was said by an unnamed source in Sunday Times Magazine, 8 June 1975, although James Ruddick attributes the remark to Dominick Elwes.

  4. Daily Mail, 19 September 1998.

  5. Goldsmith, Annabel: An Unconventional Life.

  6. News of the World, 8 November 1981.

  7. Ruddick, Lord Lucan: What Really Happened.

  8. In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, 11 October 1998.

  9. Daily Express, 20 January 1975.

  10. Daily Mirror, 9 August 1998.

  11. In 2000 the robes were sold at auction for £3,290.

  12. In Lord Lucan: What Really Happened, Lady Lucan told James Ruddick: ‘It might seem very grand to have someone who is always there to look after your children, to wash the nappies and change the beds and generally take them off your hands. But then you ask yourself: what is there for me to do? They’re my children, after all.’ With regard to the sacking of Lilian Jenkins, Ruddick wrote: ‘Perhaps it was a conscious cry of anger, a determination to take charge, in spite of what her husband demanded.’

  13. Sunday Times Magazine, 8 June 1975.

  14. Norman Lucas, The Lucan Mystery (W. H. Allen, 1975).

  15. Sunday Times Magazine, 8 June 1975.

  16. Ibid.

  17. News of the World, 8 November 1981.

  18. In an article on the Lucan case for Vanity Fair, Dominick Dunne wrote that Lady Lucan had been dubbed an ‘NOC, darling’ [not our class].

  19. Part-quoted in Ruddick, op. cit. Most of the remarks were originally made in the Daily Express, 20 January 1975.

  20. Ruddick, op. cit.

  21. News of the World, 1 November 1981.

  22. In conversation with Ruddick, op.cit.

  23. Sunday Times, 20 September 1998.

  24. Daily Express, 20 January 1975. Lady Lucan’s contract with the newspaper was referred to by James Fox in the Sunday Telegraph, 10 October 2004.

  25. Daily Mail, 19 September 1998.

  26. The ‘shocking outbursts’ are mentioned in Ruddick, op. cit.; the phrase ‘aggressive and unbalanced’ is from James Fox, Sunday Telegraph, 10 October 2004.

  27. Ruddick, op. cit.

  28. The suggestion that the drug
s were ‘partly’ to blame for the paranoia and hallucinations comes from Marnham, op. cit.

  29. As attested in Lucas, op. cit.

  30. Dr Ann Dally, who died in 2007, was a supporter of the methadone treatment for heroin addicts. Although found guilty of professional misconduct for ‘over-prescription’ of methadone in 1983 and 1987, she continued to criticize conventional drug policies.

  31. News of the World, 1 November 1981.

  32. Sunday Times Magazine, 8 June 1975.

  33. Ibid.

  34. These rumours were cited, with additional baroque elaborations, in a Daily Mail article entitled ‘The Vicious Campaign of Hate that is Haunting Lady Lucan’, 27 June 1975. A friend of Veronica’s named Peter Langley spoke out against the ‘evil untruths’.

  35. Quoted in Marnham, op. cit. He wrote that Aspinall at such times sounded like ‘a violent version of Mr Micawber’.

  36. Sunday Times Magazine, 8 June 1975.

  37. Quoted in Ruddick, op. cit.

  THE STORY: HOUSE BLUE

  1. Antonia White, The Sugar House (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1952).

  2. Nick Peto, Peto’s Progess (Long Barn Books, 2005).

  3. In a letter to Robert Conquest of 5 January 1989; from Zachary Leader (ed.), The Letters of Kingsley Amis (HarperCollins, 2000).

  4. In Trail of Havoc, Patrick Marnham wrote of Lucan: ‘The judge considered him arrogant and untruthful and, on his own admission, lawless.’

  5. In The News of the World, 1 November 1981, Lady Lucan spoke of having fallen ‘into the trap of taking up some of my lonely life with doctors who would talk to me.’ Lucan, she said, ‘used this against me. He went to court without my knowledge and on the evidence of two doctors was granted temporary custody.’

  6. Along with much of the evidence given to the inquest, Kait’s testimony was widely published in newspaper reports: for example the Daily Express, 18 June 1975.

  7. Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987 (OUP, 1990).

  8. This information was also cited in a 2012 television documentary, Fred Dinenage: Murder Casebook, which contained interviews with James Ruddick and a former police officer on the Lucan case.

  9. News of the World, 1 November 1981.

  10. Daily Mail, 19 September 1998.

  11. Daily Express, 31 October 1975.

  12. News of the World, 1 November 1981.

  13. Sally Moore, Lucan: Not Guilty (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1987).

  14. Ruddick, op. cit.

  15. Moore, op. cit.

  16. Ruddick, op. cit.

  17. As posited by James Fox, Sunday Telegraph, 10 October 2004.

  18. This was reported by James Fox in the Sunday Times, 22 June 1975.

  19. News of the World, 1 November 1981.

  20. Sunday Times, 1 November 1998.

  21. Quoted in Marnham, op. cit.

  22. Later, Veronica herself would say that her husband had actually paid the nannies to leave. ‘He would take them out to expensive dinners, and the more they drank, the more they talked and he would persuade them to go. The intention was to make it look as if I could not keep staff’ (News of the World, 25 October 1981). This suggestion seems never to have been made elsewhere.

  23. The Daily Mail, 10 October 1985, reported that Christabel had ‘escaped death at the hands of Mrs Rivett’s killer that night in 1974 only to be killed herself and hacked into more than 100 pieces… Mrs Boyce escaped at the Lucans because she and 29-year-old Mrs Rivett, who were colleagues, swopped shifts at the last moment.’ There is absolutely no corroboration for this fascinating allegation.

  24. In an interview with the News of the World, 25 October 1981, Lady Lucan said: ‘He still had keys to the house – I never stopped hoping he would come home’.

  25. Ruddick, op. cit.

  26. In Trail of Havoc, Patrick Marnham suggests that Lady Lucan also walked regularly past her husband’s Elizabeth Street flat, in the same way as he patrolled Lower Belgrave Street: ‘In a thoroughly sensible move she responded to this harassment in kind.’

  27. Daily Mirror, 9 August 1998.

  28. Lucas, The Lucan Mystery.

  29. News of the World, 1 November 1981

  30. In Ruddick, op. cit.

  31. This letter was revealed by Dennis Gilson, the accountant who in 1975 was appointed Lucan’s bankruptcy trustee. He sold it to the News of the World in 1979, with the £1,000 proceeds going into the bankruptcy fund.

  32. Goldsmith, Annabel: An Unconventional Life.

  33. Daily Express, 12 November 1974. The cover story, together with a photograph of Miss Colquhoun, was headlined ‘Deb’s Plea to Hunted Earl’.

  34. This version of events is from David Gerring. To the News of the World, 25 October 1981, Lady Lucan gave a slightly different account in which her husband did speak to the headmistress. ‘[She] was sarcastic with him. Our troubles over our children were well-known. She told him she had not the faintest idea why Frances was not at school, and hung up.’

  THE INVESTIGATION: MURDER

  1. In a 1968 letter to Francis Wyndham, then editor of the Sunday Times Magazine.

  2. In the News of the World, 25 October 1981, Lady Lucan explained that she had been rushing that night with the children’s supper: ‘In our haste we forgot to put the chain on the door.’

  3. Daily Express, 20 January 1975.

  4. Daily Express, 17 June 1975.

  5. In the News of the World, 25 October 1981, Lady Lucan claimed to have guessed that her husband would have driven to the Maxwell-Scott home: ‘I’d tried to mention this the night before [7th] but the hospital wouldn’t let me speak to the police until I was stitched up… Next morning, the policeman was there to ask me questions and I told him where I thought John had gone. I was right.’ This notwithstanding, the Maxwell-Scotts did not enter the police investigation until 9 November.

  6. In Sally Moore, Lucan: Not Guilty.

  7. Moore, whose research is formidably detailed, describes the blood thus: right shoe, toe and upper; left shoe, sole and upper; blood inside the arches of both shoes. All blood from group B.

  8. As said to Ruddick, op. cit.

  9. The Sun, 5 November 2004.

  10. To Sally Moore, op. cit.

  11. The Sun, 1 December 2012.

  12. Ruddick, op. cit.

  13. Aspinall’s magnificent pink house stands just two doors away from the former home of Thomas Cubitt, chief architect of Belgravia.

  14. News of the World, 25 October 1981.

  15. Marnham, op. cit.

  16. In The Times, 21 June 1999, Bill explained: ‘He rang me just after the event but the bedside phone was turned off and when the girl answered the phone downstairs she thought I wasn’t in.’

  17. Marnham, op. cit.

  18. Sunday Telegraph, 10 October 2004.

  19. Quoted in Marnham, op. cit.

  20. Marnham, op. cit.

  21. News of the World, 8 November 1981. Lady Lucan claimed only to have learned about this hearing through a paragraph in the newspapers: ‘When I showed it to Detective-Sergeant Graham Forsyth, the policeman guarding me, he got up and said: “Come on”... the Sergeant took me home to change, and then rushed me to the court in his Panda car.’

  22. In the News of the World, 1 November 1981, Lady Lucan stated that she had returned unaccompanied to 46 Lower Belgrave Street after the murder. ‘I let myself into the dusty, dimly-lit hallway of the big, old house full of apprehension…I spent that night there completely alone and I was very frightened. My bedroom door didn’t lock and I heard every creak during the night. But I got through it.’

  23. This remark was recalled in the Daily Mail, 29 April 1998.

  24. Sunday Times Magazine, 8 June 1975.

  25. Daily Mail, 19 September 1998.

  26. Miss O’Donnell also attended the auction of the Lucan silver, and was pictured at Christie’s in the Daily Express, 28 November 1974. She was said to be ‘keeping a watching brief for Lady Lucan’, who had opposed the sale.


  27. Agatha Christie had written to her brother-in-law, the playwright Campbell Christie, telling him that she was going up north to a spa town. Eleven days later she was discovered where she had said she would be, at the Hydro hotel in Harrogate. Her confused intention had almost certainly been for Campbell to act as an intermediary between herself and her husband, whose love she was seeking to reclaim; and for her ‘disappearance’ to remain a private incident.

  THE INVESTIGATION: THE CIRCLE

  1. 20 January 1975; the necklace had belonged to Lucan’s great-aunt. Similarly, on 18 June 1975 the Daily Mirror printed adjacent photographs of Veronica and the ‘millionaire’s wife’ Christina.

  2. Daily Mirror, 20 June 1975.

  3. Daily Mail, 3 June 2007.

  4. These must have been addresses loaned by friends. Egerton Gardens is directly opposite the Holy Trinity church.

  5. Daily Express, 20 January 1975.

  6. Mentioned in Moore, Lucan: Not Guilty.

  7. Glenn Campbell, presenter and researcher of BBC1’s 2013 Inside Out documentary.

  8. Daily Mail, 3 June 2007.

  9. Stephen Hensby was interviewed by the Daily Mail, 23 October 1999.

  10. Daily Mirror, 20 June 1975.

  11. Daily Mirror, 8 March 2012. Former Detective Chief-Superintendent Drummond Marvin asserted the belief that Lucan was in Africa, having had plastic surgery paid for by his friends.

  12. Gerring also referred to the tradition, which in fact happened on only one occasion, of hanging aristocrats with a silk rope – ‘That would have been something to see’ – suggesting that in an earlier century this might have been Lucan’s fate.

  13. James Fox quoted in Ruddick, op. cit.

  14. Ruddick, op. cit.

  15. Moore, op. cit.

  16. Marnham, op. cit.

  17. Ibid. Patrick Marnham wrote that ‘Veronica, who knew exactly why he had come, was not particularly impressed…’

  18. Quoted in Ruddick, op. cit.

  19. Marnham, op. cit.

  20. Daily Mail, 27 June 1975.

  21. Taki wrote this in The Spectator, 23 October 2004.

  22. This remark, much quoted, was originally made in Brian Masters, The Passion of John Aspinall (Cape, 1988).